The basics of Quick Look
Written by: Scott Haneda on Sunday March 30th 2008, 5:43 am
Filed under: Finder, Little Smokies, OS X 10.5
As Apple says, “opening files is so 2006″, we tend to agree. As our first post to the quick tips section, otherwise known as the Little Smokies category; we will explore just a little of Quick Look.
Quick Look saves time. For every file on your computer, if you want to view the contents of the file, you have to open the file. You then have to wait for it’s parent application to launch, and finally, you get to see what is in the file.
There is a much faster, and easier way.
While this only applies to OS X 10.5 Leopard, that should not be an issue, since you have all upgraded to Leopard by now. Find a file, select it, and press the space bar.
You should see a floating window pop up, allowing you to view the files contents. It can be a Word file, an image, a text file, almost anything.
Even nicer, you can select groups of files; for example, a large chunk of images someone just sent you. It is then simple to move through each image with the small arrows in the Quick Look window.
Quick Look offers other features, such as a thumbnail view, auto-import to iTunes, and much more. For now, enjoy knowing that just pressing the space bar will invoke Quick Look.
Stay tuned for an in-depth tutorial featuring all the aspects of Quick Look. In the mean time, please feel free to discuss Quick Look in the comments.
Is there a easy way to change the keyboard shortcut of quicklook?
Comment by 閻魔彌勒 03.30.08 @ 10:42 amThe thing that gripes me most about QuickLook is that it won’t show you the contents of any file that doesn’t have a recognized extension, even when you know it’s plain text (or you want it rendered that way). I wish you could hit some modifier key along with the spacebar (such as SHIFT+spacebar or ALT+spacebar) to have it display the selected file(s) as plain text. You might even sometimes find this useful in certain cases where you know the file isn’t plain text, such as when looking over an executable for obvious plaintext strings.
Comment by Jack 03.30.08 @ 11:37 amhttp://www.qlplugins.com/ offers plug-ins to make Quick Look even more functional.
Comment by Joseph 03.30.08 @ 1:42 pm@閻魔彌勒, the official menu based shortcut is command-Y, you can over-ride near all menu based shortcuts in your keyboard and mouse system prefs. Just go to the keyboard shortcuts section, click the + icon, add a new shortcut for Finder, with the menu title as ‘Quick Look’ and give it a new keyboard command.
Tested it here and it does work.
Comment by Scott Haneda 03.31.08 @ 9:00 am@Jack, where do these text files you are having issues with come from? I can Quick Look any text file, even sans the .txt extension just fine.
Comment by Scott Haneda 03.31.08 @ 9:01 amClick on the documents file and press shift and all you get is a file folder. You cannot see its contents. So where’s the quick look?
Comment by Bob Cunningham 03.31.08 @ 2:26 pmBetter yet, click on a .doc and I get a “Lorum Ipsen” file like adding a text page from Pages. Full screen does not work. Intel iMac 7,1 OSX 10.5.2. Am I missing something?
Comment by Bob Cunningham 03.31.08 @ 2:30 pm@Bob, Quicklook can not see inside a folder, it is only for viewing files. There are add ons that let you, as well as even peek in on zipped files. We will cover this in our full Quick Look tutorial.
Comment by Scott Haneda 03.31.08 @ 2:30 pm@Bob, are these old word files, or the new docX files? It could be Quick Look has not yet learned how to read the docx format just yet.
Quick Look is for a quick poke at a file, if you need to go full screen, you are going to have to open the file in it’s parent application.
Never seen the Lorem Ipsum stuff before, if you want, email me the file and I can see what happens on my end.
Comment by Scott Haneda 03.31.08 @ 2:33 pmNEAT!!!!! I love this function and never knew about it before! I just looked at a docx file and it worked just fine - showed me the whole page in a mini view. Thanks!
Judie
Comment by Judie 03.31.08 @ 3:00 pm
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